


"i am a fire that was set"

by seraphy



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Flashbacks, M/M, SEP / Omnic Crisis Era, mild violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-24 01:02:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19713145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphy/pseuds/seraphy
Summary: A rescue mission in the SEP goes terribly wrong.(A story for the 2019 R76 Reverse Big Bang.)





	"i am a fire that was set"

**Author's Note:**

> wow..... what can i say except i'm Relieved, excited, and nervous at the same time! this thing is two+ months in the making. i had the pleasure of working with @svntysix (on twitter) who created [the wonderful art](https://twitter.com/svntysix/status/1147867895575302145) that goes along with this story for the r76 reverse big bang. i've never completed a story of this magnitude before, and i hope it's received well <3 
> 
> thank you for reading! 
> 
> find me @acroliht on twitter :)
> 
> edit: didn't realize how much ao3 fucked up my formatting, wow. thanks google docs! fixed an issue with some of the paragraphs not having the proper spacing in between; it really fucked with the flow of the story. i was working all 3 days so i never got a chance to fix it. sorry about that!

_“They were willing to try anything. Commander Reyes and I, well… they tried everything.”_

The world was on fire. 

Smoke laid on him like a second skin, thickened the air. Buildings were burnt away to their foundations, and in the distance, he heard the shrill, thin shriek of splitting metal as it folded in on itself. He closed his eyes. A million other sensations occurred to him. They’d overwhelm him if he let them; the acrid smell of ash, a gasoline spill, the hissing of a growing fire, the dull murmurs of voices both behind him and one hundred feet away. It was an amalgam of sound, both high and low, like several hundred frequencies all being fed to him at once.

And then there was him, its receiver, helplessly stationed on the outskirts of a dying city.  
He looked down at the roads, asphalt cracked open; it looked fragile as glass from up here, the skeletons of abandoned cars littering the sides of the street. Some of them were crashed into storefronts, others halted at dead streetlights. Even from this height, he was able to see items scattered along the road, hinting at humans’ last ditch effort to flee. He saw shoes. Purses. His sight was sharp enough to catch the glint of flame off gemstones of lost jewelry.

Five months ago, it would have given him a headache. 

Now, he was able to tune out most of it. He had long since gained mastery over what his senses could and could not perceive; he distinguished what was important from what was unimportant, honed in on what he needed and silenced the rest. If he really wanted to, he could hear the wind rushing under a bird’s wings from five hundred feet away. The mechanical kinks of someone reloading a rifle. Gabriel, his voice low, talking to another member of the fireteam.

He opened his eyes. Night was falling, and the flames from the dilapidated city blanched against an almost cloudless sky. The rag he was using to cover his nose and mouth was black. Every time he coughed, what he coughed up was as dark as the sky above him; the last mask had been given to a child who had been safely evac’d away. His enhanced eyes--watering profusely--easily picked out the muted colors of the American flag, stiff, fabric melted away from the flames, atop the spire of some collapsing building, and something in him _shifted,_ ever so imperceptibly. 

_Seven million people dead_ , last he saw on the news. Casualties were constantly climbing, and that was just in the US alone. _Twenty percent of the population_ , he figured, when he stayed awake staring at the goddamn ceiling at night just to catch a break, Arizona heat strong and stuffy, to do the math. 

And here he was, former salutatorian, took five AP classes senior year, varsity hockey team. Boasted his 4.3 GPA, well on his way to becoming an astrophysicist, as if back then it had actually _mattered._

Look where _that_ got him. 

The collective psyche of the United States--himself included--hadn’t been able to conceptualize what _destruction_ actually meant. The American definition of _destruction_ was limited to a select few, scattered events depicted in a textbook. Civil War, the only war _definitively_ fought on American soil. Six hundred thousand people, roughly. Pearl Harbor, roughly two thousand. 

Casualties from the Crisis--as it was colloquially known in the States, at least--superseded the Civil War by almost one thousand percent. God knows how many are left.

He heard Gabriel arrive long before he saw him. They were perched on one of the few intact buildings that remained: the belltower of some church isolated from most of the fire. It was mostly silent around here; the absence of fire only emphasized the disquiet, the looming promise of destruction. But once the wind blew the embers here, this church would go down too; plenty of wood around to keep the fire strong. The city was too far gone, and he heard the howl of the wind as it passed through the open understructures of gutted buildings.

“They evacuate everyone?” Jack eventually asked, Gabriel easing himself beside him. 

“For the most part, yeah… leaving us behind to finish the job. Get the rest of civilians to a safehouse if we can. Apparently some of them are still stuck out there, holed up at the top of the library we saw coming in.”   
  
Jack knew that tone, and he dreaded asking. “How many didn’t...?”   
  
Gabriel shrugged, and his face flashed with something that might have been pain. It scrunched, but he looked away. “Don’t know.” 

Now add a variable amount to that seven million, and he felt his heart sink just a little more. They both sank into silence, Gabriel picking at his lip. He did that when he was nervous. 

Returning to the topic, Jack asked, “Who?”   
  
“Not sure. Some first responders, couple of civilians. One of those civilians happens to be the mayor’s daughter. Couldn’t get a read; ‘pparently there was a bastion stationed right around there. That’s what they saw, anyway, before they had to clear out.”

“A _bastion_ ?”   
  
For a moment, Gabriel’s face flashed with uncertainty. There were times, Jack noticed, that Gabriel was as prone to terror as anyone else. As prone to joy, desire, fear. He forgot that, sometimes, because Gabriel gave the illusion that he was anything but steel.

As soon as it was there, it was gone, and his face rippled with determination. “... Yeah.”

“It didn’t get deactivated?” Meanwhile, Jack was confused.

“Must not have.” Gabriel was anything but flippant, even if his voice was calm. “Telling you. They should have just done an EMP and be finished with it.”

 _It would have been murder,_ Jack thought, furrowing his brows, _which was why they hesitated._

“They couldn’t do that. They had… lives, dreams, you know. Emotions.”

“I know.” 

Jack was silent. This issue was always one of contention between them, but Gabriel seemed to vacillate between sides more than anyone else. And it wasn’t because Gabriel sanctioned murder; he knew that. It was a problem that didn’t have a concrete answer… or an answer that wasn’t, at best, ethically deplorable. “...If they had known what would’ve come of it, I think they would have.”

Now Gabriel’s face shuttered, quickly, and he looked pensive. He propped his knee up on the edge of the rise and looked out into the dark, where the fires burned bright. “I don’t know how the bastion escaped. Or how it survived the recall. Supposedly, when they were bringing them all back in--to be shut down--this one just… popped off the map. Stopped showing surveillance, didn’t have any coordinates.”

“So they let _a bastion wander the streets?_ ”

Gabriel made a face. “Not exactly. They flew in, looking for it. They found its parts, scattered all over the city. It was… morbid.”  
  
“Right. I think I remember--they thought that was the end of it.”   
  
“But it wasn’t. And now we have to deal with it.” 

Jack remembered that story. He had just joined the army then. Before it had been … violently dispatched, it took an elderly couple and a mother and kid with it. 

It claimed to hate fighting against its own kind. 

He tried to recollect the details; he remembered following it, because he had been curious about what would happen to the other bastions that were in the military. They cross-referenced the serial to the parts they found and it had matched up; that was the bastion that had disappeared. There’s no way this could be the same one. The parts were collected; there had been nothing left.”

Jack shook his head, lifting his eyes to the carnage ahead of them. Suddenly he felt sick. “And they don’t know _where_ ? Or how many hostages?”   
“Nope. They couldn’t talk; bastion might have heard them if they did.”

“They’re sure it’s a bastion…”

“Yes.”   
  
There was a terse silence. “So it’s up to us.”   
  
“Hey, supersoldiers can take up to fifty percent _more_ bullets than a normal human,” Gabriel griped. He was back to his old self, back squared and chin high, cynical and bitter. “So we’ll stay alive for about five seconds more before we get gunned down by a single clip.”

Jack pulled the cloth up over his mouth. Tightened his sweaty fingers over the metallic surface of the rifle. He could hear the softness of Gabriel’s breath, even though they were five feet apart, and hearing it was nothing short of some kind of homecoming. “Don’t talk like that. We’re here for a reason. A ten percent survival rate out of the first phase. If we’ve gotten this lucky, then we can survive any--”  
  
“No such thing as luck,” Gabriel said, the corner of his mouth dimpling in a frown, “just good genetics.” 

Jack was silent at that. They’d lost a lot. 

Would they qualify as a statistic? Another one of seven million? 

Finally, he asked, “How are we getting there?”   
  
“Foot. Any other sound might wake up god knows what other machines are lurking in there.” Gabriel began to descend down the staircase, just beneath the rusted bell. His footsteps paused, then he called out, “We’re waiting on you, Hoosier.”

Jack couldn’t help his smirk. “Noticed you hadn’t been brooding lately. Thought I’d take your place.” 

With one last glance at the ruin, he stepped down the stairs and into certain death, side by side with Gabriel, just like always.

  


He joined the military because he wanted to save the world. 

Well, he was gonna get drafted anyway. 

He remembered the first night the crisis reached America: his mother sat pensively on the couch, waiting for her husband to return home--chief firefighter, always reeking of soot--her dark hair in wild strands. Jesus stood above her, overlooking the parlor, as the news flicked ceaselessly on in the background. Their gazes seemed to meet, briefly, from behind the posts of the stairwell, and his eyes were desolate and haunting: it became a caricature of peace and generosity. It resembled inaction, impassivity, blankly witnessing the mindless slaughter and not raising a finger to do anything about it. 

He had curled his hands around the posts. She didn’t know he was there. He was still young; a senior, ripe with promise and opportunity, heart already set on MIT. He smelled the crisp, light smell of the rink on him. 

His mother put her palm to her forehead and swept back the hair that was escaping her tight bun. 

And she wept. 

He turned his eyes to the television. Back then, they were still mounted on stands and walls. 

_CASUALTIES CLIMB TO JUST OVER TEN THOUSAND IN RUSSIA_

It had been alarming at first, but like all tragedies, it was quickly distanced from his mind; constant media exposure rendered him and his friends desensitized, and they danced around the catastrophe with lighthearted, insensitive jokes. He glanced over the headlines with a disengaged stare--the American propensity for noncommittal, unaffected ignorance--and life went on. People died on another continent, humanity got its shit together, and life went on. That’s how it always worked, didn’t it? 

That’s what you do. You make a joke out of it, you distance yourself from it, and life becomes just a little lighter. It’s not that you didn’t _care,_ you just couldn’t _afford_ to care. 

That wasn’t _why_ she was weeping. 

He looked closer at the text, scrolling by at the bottom. 

_OMNICS REVOLT IN CHICAGO, 200 DEAD, AUTHORITIES STILL SEARCHING_

He froze. Felt _chilled,_ the first tremor of true fear _._ It started in his gut. Chicago was roughly two hundred miles from here.

The screen door slammed from across the room. His mother stood, thin limbs shaking at her sides, and went to embrace him. He felt like a voyeur, watching it; their sporadic, unseen bouts of affection were rare, and rarer still was this intense show of intimacy--seeing her break down into his arms like a piece of glass, Jesus looking down on all three of them. For a moment, it was like they were in love. 

His father was staring at him, eyes hard and intense, and Jack was burning with a thousand questions. His eyes said _Not now._ So he silently climbed the stairs, keeping the weight off the balls of his feet like any child did to avoid making noise, and went to bed. 

He pretended not to notice them in the morning, when he snuck his board out of the delicate spot he hid it in the yard and slipped on his grippy shoes—his mother loathed anything that resembled omnic technology, but it was better than the stuffy bus and much quicker too—but they were too rapt in the television to see him. 

That terror was like a hot breath down his neck. It loomed over him, shadowed the days that followed after. Teachers rarely talked about it the next day, and when the topic came up at the lunch table, there was nothing to say. Only silence, and the terror that receded to the back of his mind suddenly lashed to the front, and it seemed to sit in the middle of the table between all of them as a separate, foreboding entity. It was an odd contrast; the news covered it constantly, but the population shoved it aside.

“I hope I die first,” someone joked as they forked at their shitty salad, and everything was alright again. Games still went on, the puck still went into the net, and exams didn’t stop getting any closer. 

Graduation should have been a cause for celebration--his friends were still alight, laughing with unparalleled hilarity, even though it took on an almost feverish quality--but that night had undermined it. Cast it all in a doubtful shadow. His mother never cried, never broke down; she was the bulwark of the family, usurping his father’s role when he was away. He thought of her tears constantly, heard her sobs in his head—like remembering the sound of a glass floor cracking beneath your feet.

The terror grew; it spread like a disease. He read the articles about the UN and the G8 trying to put it all together. How to fight back against a self-evolving enemy, how to fight when all they had to do was create more and more, better and better. Sheer war of attrition. Sheer war of human flesh. 

Never figuring out _why_ they revolted. What malfunctioned. Kill first, ask questions later. 

And though he should have smiled, cheered, or wept on graduation day, all he could think about was the terror two hundred miles away, encroaching ever closer. His mother and father did not cheer. He saw their faces in the stands, pale and impassive, clapping politely. His mother was like a pale lotus, patient, dying after its bloom--a fading chocolate whorl of hair on her head. 

He couldn’t say how he came to _that_ decision, or that it was even something he truly _wanted._ And he knew his mother and father would have something to say about it, but he was eighteen now-- _eighteen--_ and if he could choose what college he wanted to go to, he could choose whether he wanted to join the military or not. 

She feared for him, for his father, what she would do without either one of them. How she would support the other in his absence. She relied on him more for the comfort the physicality of a presence offerer. His father became more busy; he was called to tend to fires in cities far away, caused by the growing crisis and a dearth of first responders. His absence was like a bullet hole in his mother’s already fragile chest. 

Together--as separate as he might have felt from them--they formed a sturdy, reliable triumvirate. He just never felt like he was truly apart of it, though he felt the aftershocks of its collapse. 

He couldn’t go to MIT. He was rejected. 

His mother was skinnier, her cheekbones sharp, and her eyes were almost rabid with paranoia and fear. Unlike him, she couldn’t push aside what was happening. She could, as long as he was around during the day, but as he grew older, she stopped sending him upstairs, and instead he watched her slow, emotional deterioration in private. He felt helpless, knowing the impact of his own choice, but he had to believe that he could do _something._ If no one would, then _he_ would, and in the wake of his rejection, he didn’t want to rebound into that passive, inactive mindset he had before. 

She relied on him to carry her through the day, and watching over her became an almost twenty-four hour job; he fixed her coffee, helped her out of bed, cleaned the house, because she had never let it get so dirty. The news was a constant fixation; even he gravitated toward it, unable to separate himself from the terrifying, gory headlines. Congress began to contemplate reinstating the draft. No one in their right mind wanted to sacrifice themselves to an enemy they hardly understood. An enemy hardly like _them._

Some argued it made it easier. Easily put a bullet in the heart of something that couldn’t feel. 

She was at the kitchen table one night, her focus pulled over a small pile of bills. His father was in Indianapolis, and wouldn’t come back until the weekend. 

He never told her he met a recruiter. Never told her he took and passed the ASVAB and the medical exam, just that he was hanging out with some friends, playing a round of baseball, watching the Colts. And she never questioned it, because she wanted him to live out the last few months of his old life before transitioning to the local community college.   
Now, standing at the threshold, he didn’t know if he had it in him to tell her. 

“Mom,” his own voice felt small, suddenly, “I need to tell you something.” 

He remembered how she lifted her head slowly, like she was underwater. Her eyes were tired, sunken in, and the months’ sleeplessness left their mark; she was thin, purpled, as fragile as a tower of cards. He anxiously fingered the plane ticket in his pocket. _Fort Benning._ Georgia. 

“Go on,” she said tiredly, brushing her hair out of her face. 

He was silent for a long time. Weighed the words carefully, though they still fell like stones. 

“I’m joining the army.”

The thing is, she didn’t react right away. She blinked at him, wordlessly, and in that moment she looked like a pale, lifeless doll who suffered years of neglect. The seconds stretched out, and she was giving him a stare that could have penetrated iron: unwavering, fierce, uncompromising.

Angrily, “ _No_ .”   
  
Immediately, time resumed, sped up. He launched into his prepared rebuttal, just like how he used to prepare for debates in class, meticulously approaching the argument from all sides, reorienting himself to navigate it. “I know you’re upset but I want you to listen to me--”

She didn’t give him a chance. “No arguments.” 

“Mom--”  
  
“ _John,_ I said _no._ End of discussion.” 

“I already. . .”

“Jack, no,” and her voice suddenly turned pained, as if merely saying his name was raw agony, like she was cosigning his death, like she had resigned to his absence.

He steeled himself. Looked her in the eyes, and he felt like he was turning to stone, but he knew how to compromise compassion and logic. He took the best from both of them.   
She was smaller than him; it had been that way for many years. He felt the gap between their heights as he put his hands on her shoulders, acutely aware of the bone cutting through her shirt, the untamed hairs curling out of her bun. “I know you don’t want me to do this—“ and she conceded, but her face was mangled with grief— “but I have to. They’re gonna--they’re gonna reinstate the draft anyway. The Senate just passed it.” 

She was silent now, but she was retreating into herself. “They’ll spit you out, Jack. You don’t got the heart for it. To kill people. You haven’t seen--”  
  
“I’m not killing _people_.” 

“You never seen their eyes. You know there’s something there when you look them in the eyes.” 

“Mom, my mind is made up.” The words came out harsher than he intended. “Let me do this. I want to--” _Prove myself._ “... I’m leaving tomorrow.”

She sat back down, her entire frame shaky, like the wind was knocked out of her. “You did this behind my back.” 

“I knew you wouldn’t … let me go.” He paused, then pushed onward, “I’ll be okay, I promise. I’ll write. I’ll call.” He was rambling, trying to soothe her. He sat down on the chair next to her, leaning just a bit to look her in the eyes, wide, wrinkled around the edges. She was lean with hunger; not from a want of food, but from fear. “You know me. I don’t cause trouble. And it’ll be _good_ . I can earn us money. _A lot_ of money. I can get us insurance.” He took her hands in his, and they were pitifully small and weak. “And they’ll pay for my education. I know you were worried about how we’d pay for that. You won’t have to worry about any of that anymore.” 

“Who will take care of the farm?”  
  
He was silent at that, contemplative. “I was hoping dad would--”

“When? He’s constantly away.” 

“I talked to him about it. He’ll quit his job.” 

“And who will support us while you’re away?” His mother demanded. “Your father isn’t a young man anymore. And I’m certainly not young anymore, either.”

“Mom,” Jack began again, “let me do this.”  
  
“You went behind my back.” Her voice was siphoned of its usual authority, her thin lips pressed firmly into a line, parentheses bordering her mouth. The dim light of the light over the kitchen table only accentuated her exhaustion: the almost skeletal look of her collarbones, cliffside and steep, beneath the necklace that she always wore that bore the metallic cross. _INRI_ , he read, folding it over in his head a thousand times in the silence. She turned, then, stiff and lanky, more a tapestry of flesh and bone than anything else in that moment. 

He remembered going up the stairs, hearing the familiar creak. Knowing it would be the last time; deep inside, it was certain, as sure as punctuation, as sunrise, and he remembered sitting on his bed, those fires raging miles away and the first responders, burnt, caked with soot, the infants and children, bone and awkward angles cradled in their arms like bundles of sticks, and he remembered sighing one hundred times. And he waited, and waited, bouncing his leg even when his mother came in and sat next to him in that prim and delicate way she always did, never too emotional, never too extreme. Everything he wasn’t, gentle and measured, an extinguishing force, not wildfire, not like him, wildfire in a fragile wooden house. 

She smiled at him, barren, the kind you give during a eulogy, _dulce et decorum est pro patria mori._ Just like your father, she remarked. It ought to have been praise, but it swelled in him like a bruise, ugly and aching. _Leaving, just like your father,_ but it was the words in parenthesis, the words in brackets, the words in the air.

 _Take this,_ she said. He noticed the lack of the cross around her neck, and it was a thin wire of silver bundled up in her hand, like she was shielding a pearl. _He will be with you._

The day he boarded the plane, he looked at the news. 

_UNITED STATES REINSTATES DRAFT_

  


_INRI,_ it read. _Where are you now?_

  


The city was full of bodies, too.

He smelled it before he saw it. The smell of burning flesh, smoke, and gasoline. Adelaide--their team leader--instructed them to move forward in a wedge, Stefan--their rifleman-- in front, Jack and Gabriel taking up the rear. He heard Gabriel grunt in disgust at the smell, and he wanted to bury his nose farther into the rag as if it were possible to hide himself from it. 

For the first time in a long time, he wanted to go _home._

He saw his mother’s face, her tired eyes, and thought of how he hadn’t had time to write in days. How his father traveled the two hundred miles between Indianapolis and Bloomington often, just to help with the destruction the omnics caused. Wrote the letter to pass the time, to quell his terror. Each line began with an apology, acknowledging her frayed nerves, ramming every clause with excuses. Each new paragraph began with _I met this man Gabriel and I…_

Between training, the escalation of the crisis, their deployment… he never had time. If he wasn’t on duty, he was sleeping. If he wasn’t sleeping, he was in pain, his body choking out the last lines of its defense against the foreign bodies of enhancements and implementations. For the most part, they worked together: a seamless weaponization of human flesh. 

He watched Adelaide as they crossed the final overpass, moving as one, like a neatly coordinated beast. He recognized the skyline of Indianapolis before he saw it. Most of it was destroyed, razed down in the ensuing chaos and terror that inevitably followed any omnic attack. Plumes of smoke cut deep into the sky, though the city was unnaturally silent; there was no hum of electricity, no talk, no car horns. . . _No life._

In the wake of the first incident in Chicago--almost a year ago, now--Congress attempted to pass legislation that required all omnics to be returned to their mother company and deactivated. There was fierce backlash against it; pro-omnics argued that they were sentient, that it was equivalent to mass murder; anti-omnics argued that human life was superior and infinitely more precious. 

_And what made them so different,_ he wondered, _what do I have that they don’t?_

If anything, the enhancement program bridged the gap between human and machine. He felt less human everyday, and he never knew if it was a good or bad thing. He never figured out _when_ he stopped being human, just that at some point he crossed that threshold and now he wouldn’t be able to go back. 

Indiana was his home, in a way, even if all he had ever wanted to do was escape it. Massachusetts Avenue was practically unrecognizable; there was a massive pileup of cars, broken lights, gutted theaters and storefronts along the sidewalks. It was like watching your home being ripped to shreds, knowing it would never be the same again. 

Getting to the library was tedious. They had to inch along the walls, still keeping the wedge, had to cross as much space as possible without making themselves known. The library was at the heart of the city, and the destruction only worsened the deeper they went. Sometimes, they would pass buildings with people scattered around the doors, or stop just in time to see an omnic sweep past, carting itself over the urban decay. Sometimes they skirted past piles of discarded robot parts, and though he knew they probably couldn’t feel any pain, his stomach still churned.

Normally, in any kind of disaster, there would be an immediate dispatch of a response team; they could get there faster, assess faster, help faster than humans. They were nowhere to be found, and so the city was left to languish without the care of both its robot and human inhabitants. The sewage was roughly an inch deep, and it sloshed in a grotesque, nauseating way when their feet swept through it, mingled with other water lines. He had gotten used to the smell. 

“Don’t look down,” came Gabriel’s voice, cautious. It was too dark whether to tell the water was dark because of blood or sewage.

The electricity had long gone out, Adelaide pointed out, when they stumbled into down lines. The city was just another memory, now, and this skeletal echo of it was already replacing what happy memories he did have of it.

Adelaide instructed them to stop when they came to the library. They all paused and listened. 

Wherever the bastion was, it wasn’t around here.

The library--which, in his memory, remained as grandiose and huge as ever--fared no better than the rest of the city. His eyes easily picked out the broken windows through the smog that smelled of fire and death. His mind worked quickly. He could scale the building, reach the trapped people that way, but he’d have no way of getting them down. They were supposed to regroup downtown for evac, and who knows what the hell was lurking in that library.

The thing was, omnics permeated life everywhere. They were butlers, they were librarians, they were construction workers, living side by side with humans. Peacefully, for the most part, even if people sometimes carelessly kicked the trash collectors, knocked over the domestic omnics, and claimed they couldn’t feel a thing. 

So when all of them simultaneously went haywire, it was pure carnage, plain and simple. 

Omnics were durable, especially the ones built to work in factories and construction zones. Even stronger were the ones stationed in the military, equipped with guns, armor, and electric shields. Every part of them was built to be a weapon, built to slaughter, and they were damn good at their job.

That was the biggest fear, seated deep in all of them: running into a bastion unit, designed for an all new mode of warfare. Foolishly, the government thought they would be impervious to whatever virus had made the other omnics go haywire.

They were wrong. 

Their training told them they were ready, yet Jack felt anything but. 

They passed over a collapsed construction unit: its wires spilled out, revealing the mechanical gore inside, its eyes dead, facing forward. There was dried blood on its hands, and he shuddered to think how many it killed before something--or someone--finally put it down.

Gabriel said sternly from behind, “Keep moving.” 

Adelaide led them into an intact building across the way that must have been a hotel before the crisis hit. The inside was dark, illuminated only by what little moonlight the sky had to offer. Not that it mattered to him. His eyes adjusted easily and shapes slowly morphed to life: the bloodied surface of the reception desk, a gutted elevator, red-stained carpets and shattered glass. From the lobby, he could see into the gaping exterior of the library. 

The smell of blood and decay was strong. He peered behind the counter when they passed by, and his eyes made out the wrangled shapes of two people, their necks neatly twisted at an awkward angle. Their eyes were still wide with terror, and the blood hadn’t had a chance to dry yet. Looking over the torn upholstery, the collapsed televisions, and toppled, exposed suitcases, he felt another pang of grief.

Adelaide paused before she felt it safe to talk, crouched behind an upturned couch. “The library has two stories. The bastion was last reported outside along the sidewalk we just came in. The hostages are on the uppermost floor. The plan is to evac them on the roof, since that’s the only place the dropship can reach.”  
  
“So we get up there. . .” Jack began.   
  
“. . . Do a count, get them out,” Adelaide finished. “Right. Just like the drills. We’ve done this before. Stefan, I want you to--”   
Even a normal human’s ears would have been able to pick up the thud. It was loud, thunderous, shaking the entire foundation of the building down to his bones. Gabriel’s heart picked up beside him, and everyone immediately tensed, guns at the ready, drawn at the blink of an eye.

He looked to Gabriel, thinly veiled fear in his own eyes. Gabriel mouthed _don’t say a word._

Another thud. Another. It became rhythmic, the silence between too polished and too perfect to be human. His limbs felt looser, liquid fear flowing through his veins, hardening into terror. It threatened to root him to his spot. 

And just like that, when the sound became overbearing, it _stopped._

The silence crashed down on them again. Their ragged breathing was so loud it might as well have been grenades, popping off one by one. Adelaide looked at him, extended her left arm and raised her right one briefly over his head. He obeyed, silently creeping to her right. Gabriel joined him after. 

Adelaide’s eyes dragged from the ground to the ceiling, calculating and contemplative, and her mouth moved to form her next order--  
A slew of bullets cut her off. 

She leapt away just in time, catching herself gracefully. The bullets pierced through the ceiling and she screamed, “ _It can see us!”_

Through the hole it was creating, he saw the eerie, sinister glow of its eye, turning slowly, deliberately toward him and Gabriel. It created a smooth arc of bullets when it turned, the weakened structure of the floor beginning to give. 

Gabriel acted before he did.

He was in control, smooth as ever. He grabbed Jack’s hand and hauled him off his feet, toward the direction of the reception desk at full tilt. They crossed the length of the lobby in almost a second. He followed him underneath the desk, his entire body trembling, and he felt the enhancements suppress the onslaught of epinephrine that flooded his blood. Felt it because it was a physical shift. The entire world snapped into focus, clean and crisp, and his body stopped shaking.

“How did it see us?” he said over the gunfire. Gabriel’s eyes were wide, unblinking, mirroring his own. 

“I don’t know.” 

The gunfire stopped. The silence was deafening in the absence of it, save for the mechanical whirring of the bastion reloading. The casings rolled all over the floor, dropping down from the ceiling below. Through a crack in the desk, he angled his head up to look at it. 

It was still, save for the head, scanning the area slow, deliberate. It seemed to think. It analyzed. It anticipated a million different scenarios, anticipated the behavior of the two humans behind the desk and the two just behind the staircase that led upstairs. And for a moment, it was wracked with visible, uncertain confusion. 

These humans did not match the parameters that were installed into it. 

_Stay out of its line of sight,_ Jack thought carefully to himself, and then reached for his gun, _turn around, bastard_. 

The bastion kept thinking, looking down at the hole it created. 

Its mechanical limbs suddenly shifted, contorting themselves to fit inside of its frame. Its head became a barrel. It happened in less than a second, metal grinding against metal, and it tilted the barrel _down_ at the gaping hole in the ceiling. 

Jack couldn’t figure out what it was planning to do. 

And when he did, it was too late. 

The first blast lit the entire world white. He staggered back, foreign shapes pulsating behind his eyes and pain daggering through his head. He fell flat on his ass. His mind briefly thought _AdelaideStefan--_ but his voice was lost in the fallout, the fog of pulverized concrete blocking anything he _could_ see. 

He felt the heat of fire, flourishing against his skin and lancing through his side, and all he could think of was _run._

Jack staggered to his feet, coughing in the silence as Gabriel rose up beside him. Couldn’t see each other in the dark. Phantom shapes lingered in his vision, obstructed his path, and he tripped over the dead bodies as the debris rained down on them both. 

All he could do was hold onto Gabriel’s arm and pray. 

Somewhere, he dropped his gun. He heard the clatter of it through the high pitched whine in his ears, Gabriel’s grip leading him down the hallway past the desk, toward the elevators. Halfway down, another blast flung them both forward, lighting up the hallway in a flash of white. More pain, burning at his side, _keep running_ . A million different sensations assailing his senses, relying on him to put one foot in front of the other.   
  
His toes skimmed the ground, and he crashed into it with a thud. The pain was insignificant. It was drowned out by the rush of blood in his ears. Gabriel landed beside him.

He should have been able to recover. This kind of blow was _nothing_ . But the world spun, his nerves stretched thin, and panic threatened to _engulf_ him every time he tried to move. He heard the crackle of debris, little flecks of plaster and concrete assaulting his body like tiny bullets. It rolled off of him like rain drops. The pain was nothing. He could take much more.

He put his hands over his head, waited for another blast, for the bastion to inevitably saunter down the hallway and slaughter them both in a single clip. The only thing that punctuated the silence was their ragged breathing, and he took it as a sign that Gabriel was _alive,_ in pain but _alive_. 

He didn’t know about Adelaide and Stefan. 

They waited, every muscle tense, one then two then three minutes. Time stretched on, into infinity. The wailing in his ear suppressed itself, quieted to a short, mechanical whine, like radio interference. 

“Jack?” came Gabriel’s voice. The sound was far away, his voice swimming in some distant world, and he might have missed it were it not so silent. He felt his hand before he heard it, the earth still toppled on its side. It landed on his shoulder, and his voice became urgent, almost panicked. “Jack?” 

“‘m fine … I need a second.” He bit his cheek when he fell, and the blood spilled over his tongue. In less than a minute, it’ll have clotted, numbed by the artificial antiseptic provided by the nanites in his system. 

They both waited for a sound. Gabriel tried to speak into the radio, but the signal was dead. Jack slowly got to his knees. 

It was completely dark. 

He shook his head to shake off the shock. It only made him dizzier, but he blindly reached out for Gabriel, felt his hand make contact with his clothes. “What about you?” 

“I’ll be alright,” was all Gabriel said, but Jack didn’t buy it. 

“Shit,” muttered Gabriel beside him. He was focused on something else. “Bastard cut us off.” 

“Adelaide and Stefan…” Jack started. 

He couldn’t see him, but the silence told him everything he needed to know. Silences didn’t lie. 

“We have to get out of here first,” Gabriel said, more to fill in the quiet than anything. “We can’t help them if we’re dead... Here, wait.” 

Jack heard him fumble, then flick on the switch of a flashlight. 

The light poured over the direction they came from. It was a complete wall of debris. Not accidental. 

“So they’re smarter than we give them credit for,” Gabriel mused, though his voice was grave. “Divide and conquer.”  
  
Gabriel turned the flashlight back the other way. The hallway ended shortly before them, diverging off into two sections; one held elevators, and the other led what he suspected to be the first floor of rooms, locked behind a wall that required a key.

Jack’s senses were returning to him gradually, and in the absence of threat, his enhancements slowly loosened their grip on his mind. Pain lashed through him, briefly, though it dimmed as soon as he felt it. 

The other thing they didn’t tell you about enhancements: You barely felt any pain, so you never knew what was broken. 

They trudged forward in silence. His own breathing was ragged, echoing like grenades in the silence, trying to recover from the shock of what happened more than anything else. Even his own hearing couldn’t pick up on anything outside, which was both a curse and a blessing. He could only pray Adelaide and Stefan made it out safely. 

Not sure where they could go, but Adelaide was smart. She would figure it out. 

Gabriel approached one of the elevators. “We might be able to climb up the shaft,” he suggested, Jack leaning heavily on the wall. His honeyed gaze turned toward him, flashing in the dim light. “You alright? Can you do it?”   
He opened his mouth to say no, maybe he _couldn’t,_ but then he thought of the answer Gabriel would give in this situation. As if Gabriel wasn’t in pain himself. He knew his question was genuine, that Gabriel would leave him here to rest, but the idea of Gabriel venturing alone, in this urban wilderness, appalled him. Gabriel would _never_ leave him behind. “I can do it,” he said, voice suddenly finding a firmness and resolution he didn’t know he had. 

His gaze seemed to cut through him, disarm him. He was good at fishing out lies, but Jack summoned up the same firm expression Gabriel always wore--he learned from the best--and met his eyes without fear. Saying nothing, Gabriel handed him the flashlight and pried the nearest elevator doors open. A gust of cold air flushed over him, and when Gabriel took the light back, he shined it around the shaft.   
  
“There’s a ladder. C’mon. We can climb up and get a signal, then…” 

He trailed off. Left the suggestion to hang, and said nothing else. Instead, he mounted his flashlight to his head, and gracefully twisted into the shaft to grip the first rung of the ladder. Jack followed shortly after, his stomach dropping at the maw of darkness that opened up underneath him. 

“The bastion’s still out there. There’s no way they can take it on their own,” Jack said, after a while, noticing the white numbers that announced the second floor. “Even in Germany, they need entire units just to take on one. They could be dead by the time we--”   
  
“ _Germany_ doesn’t have _supersoldiers_ , Jack,” Gabriel said. “And Adelaide and Stefan damn well know how to take care of themselves, especially together. We’ll find them, and when we do, we’ll be lucky if we even get to put a bullet in the damn thing. But we can’t if we’re dead. Understand me?” 

Gabriel had a way of talking that _sounded_ harsh, but it was calming in its certainty. He took a breath. “Yes, sir.” Gabriel wasn’t in charge of this operation, but it was instinct. 

“And how many ops have we gotten through that were worse than this?” 

“Too many, sir.”

“And did we survive?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“So what makes this different?”  
  
Jack paused. “People are relying on us this time, sir.”

“There’s _always_ someone relying on us, Jack.” 

“...You know, that was awfully patriotic of you to say.” 

Gabriel laughed. “It’s not about _patriotism_ , Hoosier. I’ll go home and be treated like shit just the same.” He turned toward him, and his eyes hardened with resolve, iron strong. “It’s knowing we’re the last front of human survival. Without us? Humanity might as well be extinct.” 

  


The first time Gabriel Reyes talked to him was after he punched some recruit’s lights out.

“That was a good right hook,” he said, while Jack was nursing his aching muscles after getting quarter-decked for a good hour. Every movement was hell. “Lucky they didn’t court-martial you for that one, but I think even sarge was impressed.”

They had been bunkmates, but they never talked. Gabriel was elusive, never up for any conversation, always crashing right at lights out and up before everyone else. He had model cheekbones, brown eyes that lightened in the sun in honey’s likeness, and somehow also had the ability to make even fatigues look good. A straight nose, thick, expressive eyebrows.

He was at the top of the class, could run three miles (before enhancements) in twenty-two minutes and that’s only because he “ _didn’t try_.” Something told Jack that last bit was just bullshit.

He had always watched Gabriel from afar. He knew him, knew his name, his rank; that was it. It wasn’t that Gabriel was a mystery. It was that Jack was too afraid to approach him, because he couldn’t imagine a world where they would be anything even remotely close to friends. Gabriel was headstrong, and though Jack was stubborn, he didn’t harbor an ounce of Gabriel’s strength. 

Gabriel had a voice. Jack didn’t.

And after almost two weeks of complete silence, now he was finally acknowledging he existed all because he punched some mouthy kid in the face. 

In his defense, he didn’t think the first round would make him that strong. 

Jack snorted, saying, “Was supposed to be a lovetap, but I guess I got carried away.”

“Well, goddamn. Remind me never to get on your nerves, blondie, because they say he’s never gonna look the same again.” 

“Maybe they should’ve enhanced his nose and he would’ve had nothing to worry about.”

Gabriel smirked and laughed. One of those low, rich laughs that bubbled like steam into the air. He could easily imagine his head angled back, his flash of pearly teeth. “ _Someone_ had to do it.” 

And just like that, they were friends. 

The days were long and exhausting, and when the threat of dying--before the war even touched you--loomed over you like a shadow, you got close with the person who slept above you. It was just the culture. 

Gabriel just happened to be the one he got close _to._ Not that he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Between operations, he learned about him, and it was like chiseling away marble—tedious, meticulous. 

(And it was a little like that only because Gabriel was _built_ like a sculpture.)

He learned about his favorite hole in the wall restaurants that he never heard of. Learned that he had a soft side, and some brothers and sisters back at home. One of his brothers was drafted. Learned that he liked Shakespeare, _Othello_ and _Hamlet_ in particular. He liked oranges and claimed to eat the shell of a banana on the back of a dare. Jack never found out when he was lying, but he was too damn infatuated to care.

Besides, he couldn’t really question the validity of his stories when Gabriel was rubbing his back as he puked. 

His body was struggling. Deep into the first phase and people sometimes just dropped like flies, but Gabriel never said a damn word and never showed an ounce of pain. He was insurmountable. Nothing broke him, because he was as resolute as steel, so much so that Jack could’ve sworn the guy was built from it. 

And he would know, considering he’s been on the receiving end of those fists multiple times.

He couldn’t really pinpoint _when_ they got close; just that they _did,_ and Gabriel became so reliable, so stalwart that he thought they might’ve been friends for years. There was a threshold, and they crossed it in a matter of months—as if there was a distinct vacuum in both of their lives, and they were vaulting to fill it, pouncing on any opportunity of it—

That opportunity being a best friend. 

And it made sense, because when he looked at Gabriel at mess… he was surrounded by people. He laughed, he joked, slapped people between the shoulders in typical camaraderie, but there was something distinctly _empty_ about it. Their friends were none the wiser, but Jack caught onto the ruse quick (and Adelaide might’ve too, judging by the quizzical glances she often shot him.) It wasn’t that he was _unhappy_ —he was as happy as someone could be, when that person was undoubtedly crippled by pain on a semi-permanent basis—but he was _distant._ Smile never met the eyes. Chuffed out a chuckle if he had to. Things like that, things someone only notices when they look close. 

He just _laughed_ different around them. Around _Jack_ . Gabriel had a habit of leaning back when he was _really_ laughing, exposing the warm column of his neck, barking out a laugh that came from the chest. They came in bursts, like gunfire, short and loud. 

He _looked_ different, when it was just _them_ during the two-mile run, matching each other stride for stride, unbridled focus and power between them, or when they were set up in a mock fight. He never knew a closeness like _that_ , being able to read and _be_ read in an instant. Someone predicting his first thought before it even occurred to him, stringing him along just for the hell of it, sticking to him during their land navigation courses when it was just them, the heat of hell, and a map between them. 

Or when Jack would stare out the window with Gabriel wordlessly beside him, and they’d watch the moon, and he’d remember how it reflected off his skin. Lambent yellow to a silver like an old, pale scar. Rubbing his aching muscles, the sinew tight from overexertion, Gabriel reaching for what he couldn’t touch. They were silent, unspoken acts of affection; thievery, in a world of sin. Humanity, where there wasn’t any. 

Gabriel took to calling him _boy scout, Hoosier,_ or any other name that was definitively _not Jack,_ and he didn’t exactly know why. Well, boy scout had come about because Jack had expertly tied a bowline knot to help Gabriel climb down the side of a building, which apparently was _not_ Common Knowledge as his father had heralded it, and ever since the nickname stuck. Even when Jack insisted that he had not once been a boy scout, even when Gabriel kept asking for cookies and Jack said that only girl scouts did that, boy scout became his new, unofficial sobriquet. 

But it was teasing, and he never had a nickname that wasn’t mockery, so he didn’t ask him to stop. It was one of those tokens of affection Gabriel rationed out, rare but treasured. 

And Jack, well, he had had friends before—but they were friends of circumstance: people to bump shoulders with on the rink, to have a catch with and tumble outside with on the baseball fields, all dirty, knobbly knees and rough punches on the arm. But there were friends and then there were _friends._ Because, as it had stood, his entire life he felt distinctly separated from the world—or rather, the world he grew up in—like there was a glass screen between him and _it,_ and for a long time he thought maybe he was just _broken._

(There was also the whole issue of loving men when everyone in his family was a staunch Republican.) 

But Gabriel, being Gabriel, just had to come and upend everything he knew. 

The first time it happened--when Gabriel treated him like a _friend_ \--was the middle of the night, a month within the course. 

He remembered how hot his body felt. It was like a fever but _worse,_ and it was only later Jack would recognize it for what it was: his body was revolting against the millions of tiny _things_ inside of it, no bigger than a speck of dust. 

He was a live wire, and if his body was just a machine, he would call it overheating. There was a ball in the back of his throat, coming up from his stomach, and his extremities were unnaturally _cold,_ like he had just shoved them into mounds of snow. It made him tremble, throwing off the covers and then ducking back under them, but his body catapulted between extremes constantly. He couldn’t catch a breath, and his stomach constantly heaved itself up to the back of his mouth. 

“Hey,” Gabriel’s voice felt too close and too far. “You’re gonna wake everyone up. Knock it off.” 

“Sorry.” He barely registered his own voice. Saw the afterimages of Gabriel lifting his head to look at him, and he felt like collapsing even though he was already laying down. 

_We don’t know exactly what this will do to you, son,_ they told him. Slid him the contract. The memory was clearer than anything; it was so sharp it gave him a headache, remembering how everything happened so fast. _And if you don’t want to, we’ll find someone else. We’re not in short supply. But you know some confidential information._

Jack had paused. Looked over the words. Right in that moment, he was gazing at Gabriel across from him, unsure if he was hallucinating him or not. The man across from him had straight hair, straight lapels, straight eyes; everything about him was straight and square, compared to Jack, then, who was rigid and narrow and lean. 

_If you die, they’ll say it’s not their fault, Jack. We’re just numbers on a paper to them, and that won’t change when we die. They’ll pack you up in a coffin and ship you away, and maybe, maybe if you make it back, you’ll have civilians saying “thanks for your service” while championing a candidate who only wants to take your rights away._

If only Gabriel had been around to say that when he signed the damn paper. 

Then he wouldn’t be in this mess, gasping for breath in the middle of the night, clinging to whatever certainty he could. Clinging to every word of hope his mother had written him in her letters-- _come home, we need you, we miss you_ \--to carry him through every rattling breath. His mother also rationed out affection very rarely, on account of accomplishment. Such a vulnerability was unprecedented. 

He drafted another letter in his mind just to pass the time, but the pain in his arms and legs superseded his thought, so he never got past the _Dear Mom_ part of the letter. 

Minutes or hours might have passed since Gabriel spoke. Jack was aware of muttering a prayer under his breath, getting caught on the same line-- _Holy Mary, Mother of God--_ and that must have tipped Gabriel off, because in a moment, he was beside him. He moved silently, like a shadow, so quick and furtive even his enhanced eyes missed it. 

“You alright?” 

“I feel--” His voice was too loud. He squeezed his eyes shut. “I think I’m dying.”   
  
Gabriel made a face. “You’re not dying.” 

“I might be. I don’know. Everything feels like it’s on fire.” He suddenly gasped for breath. “Can’t breathe, either.”  
Gabriel, more firmly, repeated, “You’re not dying.” 

“I’m gonna die and I think my mom will kill me,” Jack added. “Or my dad. Whoever gets to me first.”

Gabriel smoothed his hand over his forehead, pausing, then dropping it. “It’s just a fever.” 

“I haven’t been to confession in almost three years,” Jack gasped. “The war won’t even get me. These damn transplants will.” 

“Jack,” and the authority with which Gabriel said his name, as sure as gravity, made him stop, swimming to the source of certainty. It’s then he remembered Gabriel said he had a little brother, because the way his hand smooths over his forehead is too familiar for it to be the first time, touch soft where it had been rough. Jack closed his eyes, willing his trembling body to stop. Gabriel’s hand was warm, and he was aware of how feverish he was--the way someone’s hand feels both cool and hot when the fever is strong--just by the touch alone. “Relax.” 

Gabriel sat on the edge of the bed for a while, and Jack reached for his arm. He didn’t have the energy to speak--it all went to suppressing his own shivers. 

There was silence for a long, long time. Then, Jack whispered, “Gabriel, I’m scared.” 

He wasn’t thinking much. He flitted in and out of reality, confusing images with memories and memories with images until one subsumed the other, and he succumbed to the maw of the fever. Every time he felt like he was losing ground, he tightened his grip on Gabriel’s forearm, strong and sure, blissfully warm, blissfully alive. Images of the news flickered through his mind, and that terror became more real with every passing second. It was like someone was filtering unfathomable images through his brain, and the more he tried to stop it, the more they came.

“I know.” 

“Of dying,” he rasped, as if that hadn’t been clear. He must have looked horrible and scared shitless, because when Gabriel looked at him, that normally rough stare softened when their gazes met. Like watching hardened honey transmogrify into gold, sharp beneath the dim light. He could get lost in it—scour in it for treasure. “Or that my death will be for nothing. That’s even worse. The idea of someone going through this again, because I failed.” 

“You’re going somewhere you don’t have to go, Jack.” There, he said it again. His name. Never had such a banal name sounded so _beautiful,_ not until Gabriel said it. Made it a measure, a song, and in the throes of death it was a little bit like falling in love, scrambling for a feeling he never really understood.

(What love he had known had always been threadbare, gilded and barren. Infertile, forests stripped away to sand, a scavenger in search of any _treasure_.) 

“Maybe,” Jack wheezed, panicked tears pricking his eyes. “I don’t--I don’t want to be… what you said. Just a number. More importantly, I don’t… I don’t want this to be a world kids will grow up in. Not even my kids. Just… _kids._ ”

It’s hardly a world anymore. It’s hell. Just yesterday, the omnics reached D.C. Last week, the German military had no choice but to evacuate Berlin and retreat farther west. 

Gabriel was looking at him in awe, but not _disgust,_ like he had grown two heads--no, Jack might as well have just told him he fell from the sky and rode the coattails of a galaxy while doing it.

(He wouldn’t figure out why until later.)

Gabriel was still silent, though. Jack used this as an excuse to charge ahead. When he dropped his hand from Gabriel’s arm, he noticed the purple bruises where his fingers were. He hadn’t meant to hold onto him that hard. 

And Gabriel didn’t even complain. 

“I don’t know if you’re scared,” Jack murmured, his mind on something other than how cold he was for once. He stopped shaking, at least briefly. “... at least if you are, I know I’m not alone.” 

In retrospect, it made sense, why Gabriel was chosen to be the Strike-Commander. He had a way of calming people down, even at their most panicked, and he did it with such a flourish that Jack envied it. He was a grounding force, his north star, coming closer to home than years at the farm ever had.   
  
“I am scared. But that’s our greatest weapon.” 

Jack swallowed. Thought about his words. He wanted to make a joke. _The Great Gabriel Reyes, admitting he’s scared,_ but in truth, he couldn’t bring himself to. 

“It doesn’t feel like a weapon,” Jack muttered. “It paralyzes me. All this training, and for what? Maybe by the time we’re all finished here and deployed, the omnics will be too strong. Even for--”  
  
“You can’t let it paralyze you. So you don’t think about it.”

Jack was silent. 

“Once you think about it, it’s over. Especially out there.” 

_(Once you think about dying, it’s over.)_ The words in parenthesis, the words that are never said, the words untranslatable, the clauses between hand and flesh.

“I don’t know what else to think about. It’s all I _can_ think about,” Jack finally said. 

Gabriel inhaled. The sound was louder than he remembered it ever being, but his voice was rich, compared to the shrillness of all the other recruits. It soothed him. He saw the raw power that rippled through Gabriel’s body when he climbed to sit beside him, and wondered if he would ever reach such effortless prowess, or if he was doomed to die before he even began. 

“I can tell you about the time I unofficially adopted a lizard from the street,” Gabriel said.   
  
Jack smiled. “ _Unofficially?_ ”   
  
“Yeah. Brought him in to the house and everything. My mom freaked, but my dad was more understanding. Thought it was cool, though in retrospect, he probably felt bad for the damn thing. It couldn’t get away fast enough from me.”   
  
“ _Nothing_ can get away from you.”

Gabriel silenced him with a pointed look, but then eased into something that looked like a smile of his own. “But that’s neither here nor there. I handed the thing to my dad, who handed it to my mom. Guess that was more stress than the thing could handle.”  
  
“Oh no…” Jack whispered. “It didn’t--”   
  
“It _did_. All over her hands.” Jack started to laugh, punctuated by coughs. Gabriel continued, quieting his voice so no one would hear, “She was so mad. I just wanted a pet lizard.” 

“Did you get one?” 

“Nope.”

“Lizards are gross anyway. Scaly.” 

“Didn’t think you’d be so narrow minded.”

When Jack looked over his shoulder at Gabriel, slightly offended, he saw he was smiling. It was a little one, the corner of his mouth lifted imperceptibly, but he noticed when he smiled, his eye pinched, and he almost looked mirthful. Almost looked young and carefree, his one leg propped up on the bed, chin resting on his knee, arm carelessly slung around it. He could imagine Gabriel in high school, or maybe even college (perhaps something beyond that—) with his little half-smiles and his knowing, appraising stare that unwound him so effortlessly. Gabriel in gold, Gabriel in white, his hair growing out into the little curls Jack knew he’d be so fond of, and Gabriel as a spectrum of color, effervescent against a blacktop sky. And himself, as gray and destitute as the lands of a defeated nation, invaded, pillaged of light. 

He wondered how much youth had been stolen from him, from _them,_ and how they would both get it back. That would be a question for after the war, if they ever survived it.

Jack didn’t end up dying, but he did wake up with Gabriel’s arm half-slung over him with a hand on his thigh, and he thought, mind still sluggish with fever, that it was as close to euphoria and heaven as he would ever get. 

“What you said earlier.”

The elevator shaft was dark, and it smelled faintly like gasoline, as well as the dull, cruddy smell of concrete. Gabriel was above him, inching up carefully, floor by floor. They both hoped to reach the top floor of the hotel at the very least, or venture up to the space that had been gutted open and exposed to the air. That way they could establish a signal for their radios, get help… and hopefully save Adelaide and Stefan. Then get out. 

(If there was anything left of them to save. He kept imagining them, shredded by bullets, blood and gore just like the rest of the people in the city, too fleshy to stand a chance, the bastions stoically marching around with the memory of it on their hands.) 

As for the other civilians, Jack didn’t know what exactly would happen to them. 

“What?” Gabriel responded. He hardly even sounded strained. Just occupied, hauling himself up to the next rung of the ladder. When Gabriel moved up, Jack followed, their flashlights mounted to their heads. Not that they really _needed_ them, but Gabriel said it wouldn’t hurt.

“About being the last front for humanity’s survival.” 

After he said that, he cut himself on something sharp and cursed. 

“Yeah. What about it?”

“... Do you think that’s true?”

Gabriel paused. “You choose the most interesting times to have deep conversations.” 

“It’s just—it’s a burden.” He shook his head and felt debris fall off him. It’s a burden to carry on a legacy for millions of voices he never even knew, stories that died before they began. A burden to remember Gabriel’s smile, cling to every detail of his life that he knew, just to keep him alive when he was gone.

“You worry about the most insane things.”

“Just trying to fill the silence.” _Once you think about_ it, _it’s over._

They went on wordlessly for a while. Jack didn’t know where the elevator was, what they would do when they ran into it. He hoped that they’d be able to climb through it—he’d seen Gabriel’s strength, how he’d warped metal when he was determined enough—and climb out, but the more they ventured, the more uncertain he became. His side was still numb; it buzzed, became an almost static-like feeling, like radio interference. The pain would hit him eventually, and when that happened, he’d be deadweight. 

“Maybe not just us,” Gabriel finally answered, contemplative. “There’s _Die Crusaders,_ in Germany and Switzerland. Not super soldiers, but they damn well come close with that technology. God knows what the hell the Russians are doing. Last I heard there was some division of the _spetsnaz_ that repelled Omnic forces from Moscow… maybe they’re not too dissimilar for us. Don’t know. Information is too sensitive.” 

The idea of there being _other_ super soldiers… something in him ached at the thought. Of people going through what he went through. Of there being more people that could _understand_. 

They climbed in silence. His muscles twitched. He was having a harder time than Gabriel was. His transition was almost complete, all things considered, but there was still a ways to go. He felt it more than ever, out on the field, losing one side of sensation to meaningless noise. 

“Russians would come in handy right now,” mumbled Jack. Maybe they wouldn’t have lost the others. Gabriel chuckled. 

Again, they resumed their silence. Gabriel stopped moving, Jack’s hand absently grazing his ankle when he was searching for the next rung, and when he made a questioning noise, Gabriel looked down at him and smiled. Which meant he was planning something. 

Gabriel reached up, his hand hitting the bottom of the elevator. No panel for them to slip through.  
“Might wanna cover your ears, boy scout,” Gabriel said after a period, and before Jack could say that his hands were presently _occupied,_ Gabriel had hauled himself onto a ledge, dug his fingers between a crack in the wall, and _pulled._

Jack winced when the metal shrieked in an unholy, unnatural kind of way, the sound lancing straight through his skull. Might as well let every enemy force know where exactly they were, just short of pinging coordinates. 

Gabriel made it look effortless, though, clenching his jaw, spreading his feet, parting the door just enough for both of them to slip through, and when Jack looked up after the silence descended again, he saw his hand reaching out to him. He took it, and Gabriel, gripping him by the wrist, hauled him up with ease. 

They both slipped through the gap that he had made. Jack stared down the hallway, his heart falling at the dirty carpets, the caved in walls, the hanging light fixtures. There was some luggage cluttered in the hallway, abandoned by its owners when the omnics had initially turned. And, worse than that, were his boots that nudged the open cranium of some poor omnic who had been gutted out of anger.

He had the sensation of being watched, but his senses made him acutely aware of everything--so he figured it was just _that:_ senses overcompensating, building a threat that wasn’t there. 

It was just him, Gabriel, and the urban gore. 

(He should have remembered what his father said, one day, when they were hunting: instincts kept them alive for thousands of years, and only a fool ignores them.)

There was the smallest hint of a breeze, though. 

“Stay close to me,” Gabriel murmured, as if Jack would ever want to do anything but. 

The air was thick, dust motes swirling through the faint, dying sunrays that speared through the hallway. It colored the whole hallway a dull sepia, as if this were an old reel of a nightmare, and the smell of stale blood and sudor was strong. His entire body was shaky. His eyes registered, dimly, the room numbers, and noted that they were on the thirteenth floor. High up. And though his feet were planted firmly on the ground, he could swear that he was sensitive enough to feel the building swaying, crooked in the wind, just a few centimeters back and forth. It was nauseating, thinking of how high up they were. He forced his senses to shut down the feeling and dispelled his nausea. 

As they inched down the hallway, he was becoming increasingly more aware that something was not _right._ It was the feeling of being watched, yes, but it was also something off about _Gabriel,_ distinctly. That little voice had become persistent, and he forced his breath to still, because surely if he was aware of it, Gabriel _must_ be too--

“Gabriel,” he said softly, because that voice had become such a force the only way to get rid of it was to speak. 

“I know,” he answered, and he felt foolish for thinking that they weren’t as connected as they were. 

“It’s coming from _there,_ ” Jack whispered, so quiet his voice barely held up itself. He jerked his head forward, toward the room ahead of them, the door slightly ajar. It was like a thin… _slicing_ noise.

Gabriel furrowed his brow in that way he did when he was thinking. 

Thinking something _stupid._

“You’re not going in there alone,” Jack snapped. 

“You don’t give me orders.”

“I’m not giving you an order.”

“ _Listen_ . Whatever it is, Jack, it’s better if one of us makes it out alive. Adelaide and Stefan stand a chance with one of us. They have _no_ chances if both of us are dead. And you dropped your weapon back in the lobby.”

“I’m not giving you an order. Also, according to _you,_ we’re super soldiers, right? So a gun wouldn’t make a difference.”

“Don’t be stupid, Jack. Just let me—“

“I’m telling you as a _friend._ ” 

Gabriel gave him an indecipherable stare. He hated that. Hated when he couldn’t tell what he was thinking, when he shuttered himself off to him like that. He didn’t avoid his eyes.

They looked at each other, a silent standoff that seemed to last minutes, until Gabriel grunted his reluctant approval and gestured for Jack to stay where he was while he prowled to the other side of the door. He was over there in less than a second, and he might have missed it if he blinked. He still wasn’t used to that, the way he moved like a shadow, his shoulders pulled back, carrying his weight so lightly he hardly even made a sound. It was lethality, plain and simple. 

They waited a few moments. The sound was pervasively loud, now that they were next to the door, and he waited, still as water, for Gabriel’s signal. His fear retreated to the back of his mind, and his vision began to narrow, his muscles filling with energy. 

Gabriel moved first, his gun drawn, and Jack moved behind him, fluid, as if they were one, as if they were born to work together.

Suddenly, Jack wanted to throw up. 

He saw the source of the noise, over Gabriel’s shoulder. It was a robot--must have been a repairman, a construction worker, something of that nature--staring down at a corpse. Slicing into it, again and again, so methodically it was making him sick. It must have malfunctioned, stuck in the same task, repeating the same command on loop. 

“Jesus _f-_ ,” Gabriel whispered. He watched the scene unfold, and Jack had a feeling that he was as sick to his own stomach as Jack was, but that didn’t matter, because Gabriel was frozen to his spot with his finger hovering over the trigger and the _thing_ had noticed _them.  
_   
It moved toward them, and Jack hardly recognized his own voice when he screeched _Shoot him!_ but Gabriel said nothing, did nothing, just stood there like he had seen a ghost, and so Jack lunged forward. Took the gun from him, turned it toward the omnic that charged toward them. 

But it did something completely _different._

Just as Jack aimed it toward its legs--you can’t shoot the head, because it’ll keep going, can’t shoot the chest because it’ll keep going, the things were built to endure--it met his eyes, and for a moment, just a moment, he saw a surge of _something_. Even in retrospect, he couldn’t figure out what it was. But it looked at Jack, then at Gabriel, then behind it, and--

Jack, shocked, only had time to pull Gabriel back, thinking it was going to kill him--

But it turned its limbs on itself, and, unblinking, speared its hand through its chest. 

Jack stumbled back with Gabriel. It did it again, and again, until the light in its eyes died and it collapsed in a heap onto the floor right at their feet. It was sprawled, still, any hum of its machinery extinguished and leaving them in the silence.

When he got over his shock, he looked at Gabriel. He had snapped out of his stupor and was looking down at the thing, his expression torn between surprise and disgust. 

Jack started toward the other body. “Should we--”

“No. Leave it.”

Gabriel’s sudden stillness frightened him, and he wasn’t sure why. A ghostly quality had overtaken his features, and so Jack strapped the gun back to his belt, because he didn’t want Gabriel doing anything stupid with it. It felt wrong to just… leave the body there, where no one will find it. Then again, it’s not like they had the tools to identify who it used to be, or the ability to carry one body out of thousands.

Jack eyed the blood warily. It was fresh.

“Gabriel,” Jack tried to fill the silence again. “Are you--”   
  
“There might be others. We need to get out of here. The more we wait, the less of a chance we have at saving not just Adelaide and Stefan, but the other civilians, too. The roof is on the floor above us.” 

_Hopefully there’s no more surprises,_ Jack griped bitterly. 

The stairwell that led to the roof was dark, the air dense with the smell of death. Jack found himself getting tripped up over some of the bodies--no doubt trampled when the first wave hit--whereas Gabriel plunged forward, over machine parts and ripped clothes and dried pools of blood. The stench made him sick. He wasn’t able to block it out.   
He didn’t know how Gabriel did. 

Jack was grateful for the fresh air when they emerged onto the roof, so much so that he took a great breath that, for the first time since they left, was somewhat free of smoke and pollution. He suddenly missed the sterile, chemical smell of the base. After taking in a few breaths, he looked over to Gabriel, who was trying to establish a connection with his radio. He didn’t know how to voice that he was worried about him, since he marched rather wordlessly, and where their banter usually occupied the silence, there was none. 

“They said to wait here for evac.” 

And that was that.

“Gabriel… are you alright?”

“I’m fine.”

“It’s just… ever since we saw that omnic in the hotel room… you’ve been off.”

“I said I’m fine.”

He almost couldn’t suppress his eyeroll, but managed to stifle it at the threat of insubordination. Not that it mattered, when they were on a first name basis. “I can tell by the way you walk. Your shoulders are tense.”

There wasn’t much secrecy when sometimes Gabe got so close he could hear his heart.

Gabriel picked at his lip for a while, and that ghostly, distant quality had returned to his eyes when Jack peered at him, confused by his silence. And, since he was uncomfortable, he ventured a joke. “You know, you would call me out for lying so terribly.” 

Gabriel put his leg down from where it had been resting on the roof, and said, “Nathaniel.”

“Excuse me?”

“Some kid. Named Nathaniel. His first mission. They cornered us. A place just like this. This was when we didn’t know what they were capable of, not exactly. They butchered him in minutes.” 

Gabriel’s fingers were twitching, and he was glaring at them, as if they held that memory and had single handedly been responsible for it. “They wanted to make a point. Well, they made it.” His eyes turned toward the horizon, and he curled his hands into fists, a muscle in his jaw flexing. “He wanted to be an astronaut. His fiancée had a baby and they were waiting for him back at home. He told me, and I promised him he would make it back. So he died on account for my lie, because I was too damn slow, and too damn naive.

“Try breaking it to the family when you know it’s your fault and they know it too. You don’t barter promises in war, Jack. Too much at stake.” 

This torrent of emotion and vulnerability surprised him, and he couldn’t tolerate it—seeing Gabriel look so agonized, so shattered—so he bridged the gap between them, his hand on his shoulder. “You couldn’t have known… you tried—“

“The attempt doesn’t matter when you fail.”

“No, listen to me. For once, because if you cut me off again you’re gonna end up like that kid I punched and I don’t care if you report me for it.”  
Gabriel didn’t say anything. Hell, he might have even believed that Jack meant it. 

“It’s war. You did your best, Gabe… I know you. It wasn’t because of what you did or didn’t do.” 

“I shouldn’t have made that promise. God, what if it’s you next?” 

“What did you tell me? A long time ago, when I thought I was dying. You said ‘ _you can’t think about it._ ’”  
  
“So what?”  
  
“So don’t think about it.” It sounded blunter than he meant it to. He stopped, then added, “It’s just… it’s one moment at a time. One minute at a time, and we get through that, then we worry about the next minute, and then the one after that. Maybe there will be a day when we don’t have to do that… when we can think about the future.”  
  
Gabriel was picking at his lip again. Staggering over the _we,_ the plural pronoun. What that meant, what it might not have meant, turning it over in his head.  
  
“That’s why I fight, anyway. So people don’t have to live minute by minute. And who will fight if I don’t? I’m saving someone from this fate, I think.” Jack picked at his cuticles. He looked up, at the skyline, at the sun’s orange and dazzling light. “I’m fighting so someone else doesn’t have to.” 

When Jack looked back at Gabriel, he was staring at him. The contemplative kind of stare.  
  
“What?”   
  
“You’re unbelievable. That’s all.”   
  
“I’m gonna assume you’re complimenting me and leave it at that.” 

They fell into silence, but it wasn’t tense. Gabriel got up and started pacing across the rooftop, the way he usually did when he was planning something. Watching him made him nervous and restless, and he eventually asked, “Should we… you know. Continue? We’re exposed out here.”  
  
“And assume Adelaide and Stefan are dead? No.” He wasn’t sure if Gabriel was actually certain, or if he was just in denial. “We’re going back.”   
  
“We can’t just abandon the--”   
  
“To hell with it. Do you think regular soldiers can handle a _bastion_ ? We know it’s around here. They can take care of the search and rescue. _We_ can take care of the bastion.”   
  
“Alone? That’s _suicide._ ”   
  
“ _I’m_ your superior,” Gabriel hissed, and the ferocity of his tone frightened him even more than his silence earlier. Never had he talked to him like that. Instead of cowering, though, Jack summoned up a well of courage, rose up, and faced him. 

“That doesn’t mean I have to like it. And if you disobey orders, you’ll be discharged--”

“I don’t care. They put too much money and effort into me to replace me.” Of this Gabriel was certain, and his smirk was dry and his voice cloying, but Jack knew he was anything but pleased. The smile was equally unsettling as it was haunting; it was just a morbid display of teeth, sharklike and astringent. “They won’t throw me out. Who will they pay to keep my mouth shut?”

 _“Stop interrupting me_. I’m not letting you march us into our death! It’s literal military technology! All it knows is how to kill!”

“And we’re _not_? We _don’t_? Face it, Jack. We’re not here to serve some grand, patriotic purpose. We’re _attrition!_ That’s it! They remade us for _this_ _reason,_ so I’m sure as hell gonna take advantage of it. What’s the point in having these abilities if I can’t use them? If I can’t save people?”

Jack was fumbling for a reply when Gabriel added, “If you refuse, then I’m going alone.” 

“That’s not fair,” Jack rasped. To take advantage of his loyalty like that. To either bring him to his death or to sit and stew in the fact Gabriel was sending himself to his death. The thought of losing him lanced through him like something sharp, siphoned all the beauty the world ever had and will have, left him rattling like pennies in a castaway jar. 

“Life’s hard. Give me my gun back.” 

Stunned, Jack handed him his gun. Gabriel swiped it from his hand.

He left, and Jack didn’t say a word. 

  


_So the lizard,_ Jack said that morning, and he was smiling, though his body was hot and pressurized like the white core of a star, _you do have a heart._

 _Sometimes_ , Gabriel said, voice rough in sleep, like the feeling of sandpaper against the hand, _when I have the time._

  


It was agony, watching Gabriel march down those stairs and not chase after him.

It was a greater agony to know that Gabriel played with his love for him like that. 

Not that he knew. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe Gabriel didn’t consider him a friend at all--just a subordinate--and was oblivious to how every word of their argument speared him again and again as he replayed it in his head. 

That would be typical of Gabriel. An asshole. A total asshole who was extremely unselfish to the point of self-destruction. He hated him. 

He had pulled his knees to his chest and listened to the wind, the fading of Gabriel’s breath and footsteps until it, too, was subsumed by the distant sound of screeching metal and the high pitched whine of the building’s sway. 

Brooding had always been Gabriel’s thing. He felt Adelaide, her knocking him on the head, telling him to stop moping, rolling her eyes whenever Gabriel made a joke that was just so ridiculous she had to laugh. _Moping never did anything_ . _Moping won’t save that motherfucker’s stupid behind_. 

It’s better to be alive and punished than… well. Dead.

Miserable, Jack got to his feet and descended the stairwell after him.

Time to see how far he could go. 

When he didn’t hold himself back, the world was wide open to him. He felt every sensation—everything every human had ever been blind and deaf to: lights, sounds, smells, the mantra that became _Save him, save him,_ stalwart as a prayer and antiphon and everything in between. The energy built up in him like a spring, approaching its climax, and when it reached its zenith, it was every bit of the freedom he had always craved, because he knew there was nothing in the world he should be afraid of, nothing that could penetrate him—

Except for Gabriel. 

He cleared the landings of the stairwells in a single jump. The impact hardly afflicted his knees—he kept going, using the momentum to jump down every flight, effortless, seamless, arching with the wind in his ears. He would have laughed, if he wasn’t so terrified of the situation they were in. 

Is this what Gabriel felt like? 

His other thoughts fell away, cleared like useless clutter—but the thought of his name is what propelled him forward, barely even out of breath, barely breaking a sweat. He considered just running down the stairs like this, all the way to the ground floor—Gabriel only had five minutes of a start, he calculated, and with this speed he might already be gone—but his mind rejected the idea. _Too slow_ , it said, superseding instinct and its rabid thoughts, _even at this rate_. 

He crossed hallway they came from in less than a few strides. 

Jack wasn’t sure if this was going to work. But it was worth a try. 

He approached the elevator shaft at full tilt. Launched himself right off the edge and felt the metal rungs of the ladder meet his gloved palms. 

It was almost like freefalling. His stomach in his throat, the cold, stale wind of the shaft rushing through his ears, and he had never felt so free, knowing no human before him had ever experienced this sensation of liberty. It was something equivalent to euphoria, with an acerbic tang; he bartered his humanity for it, exchanged it for something _beyond_ it. 

If it’ll help him save his friends, maybe it’s worth it.

The lobby was empty and silent, the air acrid, stale. No sign of Gabriel, but he couldn’t have gotten far. 

He managed to get out through the back, where the trash was—it was full and overflowing, and the smell made his stomach turn, combined with the smoke. 

The streets were barren. 

You don’t notice it when it’s there—the small heartbeat of civilization, the background noise that dispelled the silence—but now that it was gone, the silence was _genuine._ Primeval silence, the kind that drives a person insane. The kind that sends the mind scrambling for any semblance of noise, real or not, to the point of delusion. 

Silence used to be a form of torture. The antithesis of _exist._ His own footsteps were an insurrection against it. 

He heard before he saw Adelaide—her breathing was ragged, as if she were rasping through a throat of thorns—and he smelled the sweat and blood of her. His heart kicked up into a panic at that coppery, metallic smell; he was without arms, out in the open, the bastion could be anywhere. He followed the sound, mimicking Gabriel’s stance so he was silent, furtive, creeping along that cement jungle until he was soundless as shadow. He saw her, then, clutching her arm. She was folded behind the corner of a building, sheltered by the alley. 

She must have heard him. Her eyes snapped open. Seeing him, her body relaxed, and her breath huffed out into the fog. “Thank God it’s you. _Shit_. I thought I was done for. See that?” She held out her hand, abnormally delicate for wartime, fingers dappled with blood. “I’m shaking.” 

“Are you hurt?” 

“What do you think?”

“Dumb question. I was hoping it was someone else’s blood. Is it just your arm?” 

“Yeah. The bastard nicked me with some bullets before I got away. Tried to make a tourniquet but I couldn’t do it with one hand…”

Suddenly, Jack realized what was missing. His head shot up, though he didn’t stop making the tourniquet. His fingers were deft and fast, sharp with adrenaline, the way you shake when your backside is exposed, ripe for the bite of any bullet. 

“The enhancements should take care of the wound for the most part,” Adelaide rasped. 

“Where’s …?”

“Dead.” And then her voice was somber, and she stared out past to a point he couldn’t see. “It happened when I got away. He shot it in one of the eyes, and then… he led it away. I found his body—” 

“ _What?_ ”

She tried to be strong, but her face was cracking, collapsing like a building, folding in on the foundations. What would Gabriel do? Gabriel was ferocious, a howling force thrashing through forest and undergrowth, the thick chorus of blood and flesh and talons slicing through. But he felt lightheaded, and all the focus went to keeping himself upright, despite the way she scrubbed her eyes with the heel of her palm. 

“I tried to save him, I did--”  
  
“Hey, it’s not your fault. He did it to save you. He knew the risk when he shot it. It’s better one of us than all of us.”

“FUBAR, he would say, the fuckin’ asshole. _God_ , I _hate_ him.” 

The smell of her tears was strong, permeating the air between them. Blood and soot and salt and sweat, all the smells and sensations that linger, instruments of torment and all the misery that came with the word _memory_. 

“What about Gabriel? Have you seen him?” Jack asked suddenly.

“Here.”

Jack started, but his heart sagged with relief at the sound of his voice. “Christ, don’t sneak up on me like that.” 

They stared at each other for a few seconds. Gabriel’s eyes were hard, his eyebrows drawn together in a way that suggested he was still pissed off from earlier. He’d have to deal with it later. 

He gave him his back and went back to securing Adelaide’s arm. The blood slowed to an ooze, and her face was sallow. Despite this, she struggled to her feet, leaning on them both for help. 

“We need to get her out quick. If we don’t, she might lose her arm,” Jack said. 

“The enhancements will get me through,” she grunted. “Right now, we need to focus on getting to the library. That is our first priority.” 

She did not invite anymore questions. 

Huddled in the library, their numbers had dwindled from four to three. 

He smelled their terror. Thick pheromones, mingled with sudor and blood and their own fear, assailing his senses like a cabal of wasps. He looked to Gabriel, his face slick with his own sweat, and they both stooped down to haul a fallen piece of concrete out of the way.   
When it was clear, he was able to see them: the dim outline of their shapes, wavering in the stifling heat, cowering in fear. They were all gathered closest to the corner, and as Gabriel cleared the way for them to escape, Jack stepped forward and spoke up. 

“We’re here to rescue you. Everything’s gonna be alright, okay? There’s a dropship incoming, about five minutes from here. We’re gonna escort you to the roof and load you onto it, and they’ll take you to the nearest designated safe haven. That’s the Naval base in Illinois. There’s beds, food, showers, medical aid for anyone who needs it.” 

He went around to each of them, checking for injuries, offering what little medical aid he could. Gabriel and Adelaide arrived beside him. Their faces upturned at him, black with soot, save for the tears that razed paths through the ash and revealed pale, pockmarked, dark skin beneath each one. Their faces upturned, glimmering despite the dirt, despite the tears. 

He knew what it was, now. It was hope. 

Something tugged on his pant leg. He turned.  
It was a woman. She shared the shaky, sharp limbs of his mother, her eyes deep set into her white face and her hair sticking to her forehead. She was wrapped in a blanket, shivering, and her thin voice punctuated the silence, loud as a siren to him: “Please.” 

He knelt, his face cinched with concern. She parted the blanket and revealed a child, his eyes too big for his face, eyes the color of warm earth. 

“Hey,” Jack said softly. The kid stuffed his face into the mother’s breast. 

“He hasn’t had anything to drink…” Her wan face implored him. “We’ve been on the run for days. Weeks, even. We were displaced from our home when they…”  
He brought out his canteen, silencing her with a smile--it was small, but it must have been radiant, because she returned it--and tried to give it to the kid, but he merely shied away and hid further into her clothes.

“He wants to help you,” she uttered to him, soft as a prayer, “it’s okay.” 

There was a minor struggle, the kid resisting him for a little while, before he gave into his thirst and drank from it. His small hand offered it back to him, and he took it, his smile only broadening. 

“What do you say?” she nudged him.  
  
“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“What’s your name?” The kid’s voice again, clear as a bell.

“Jack.” 

“You have a big nose, Jack.”

“Thank you. I use it to smell out bad guys.”

The kid’s face gawked in surprise. He should have been offended, but he wasn’t. He heard Gabe giggling. The exchange was so normal, so casual, the child’s voice warm as the ring of a windchime. It took him aback. 

He’d seen things--you see things, in war--that threatened his hope. And this woman--who looked so much like his mother, it left him in a trance--renewed it somehow. The idea that humanity would not just survive, but survive with its selflessness in tact; it would go on, trudging, running, sprinting, whichever, even without him. It was like a torchlight in a cave, that rare and that treasured. 

“You did a good thing,” Gabriel said when Jack finally slid down the wall beside him. “Even though the kid insulted you.” 

“Anyone would have done it. You would have done it. And he’s just a kid. I wanted to tell him he smelled pretty bad because my big nose told me so but I don’t think that would’ve went over well.”

“Yeah,” Gabe snorted, then paused. “... But it is pretty big.”

“Not as big as your motherfuckin’ head. Contact the mothership with that thing.” 

He saw the punch coming, but it still made him lurch to the side. They both laughed, the kind that leaves you wheezing and red and out of breath. Gabriel didn’t say anything else. The tension between them loosened, their bodies relaxed, and the anger from earlier seemed to dissolve. It was their way of apology. It was their way of forgiveness, when nothing was said; they only dealt forgiveness in offers, in furtive touches and secret smiles. 

“Stefan’s dead, you know,” Jack suddenly said. 

“Yeah. I figured.”

He felt the cold touch of something metal, then the lingering touch of something warm. He didn’t need to look down to know it was the canteen and Gabriel’s fingers meeting his. _The touch of something warm._ The touch of something warm, the futile reminder of mortality, of fragile flesh and blood. 

That was the structure of those days. Neither one of them moved. 

He slid into a trance. The enhancements lent that to him, too; the ability to steal small naps in the span of minutes: quick, colorful dreams flitting like butterflies behind his eyelids, elusive, little sediments of memory that couldn’t be processed. The color of blood, earth, concrete. Gabriel’s eyes, cinnamon and simmering. Thought about how he missed his mom, his dad, the quiet life of the home he always tried to leave. Missed her quiet, sparse acts of affection, rare as they were. 

He had carried that letter around with him all day, as if savoring it, wanting alone time, silence to rejoice in the memory of home. Quiet and familiar, nothing like the red and violent turbulence of wartime. 

He remembered how he tore into the envelope. Like an animal digging for scraps, like it was his last meal, cursing his new found strength when he ripped the seal. 

_Dear Jack. . ._

What little joy he had fizzled away. Became as scarce as water in the desert, and what was left was a hole, a cavity, vacuity, scooped out where his heart was. And in its place, new rage. New pain, sharp and acerbic and rising in his throat like an acid tide, leaving decay in its path. 

_Your father is dead._

“Is that all of them?” Jack asked. 

“Yeah, pretty sure,” Gabriel said. 

His attention was diverted to the woman he spoke to earlier. She was helping her kid onto the dropship; the platform was too steep for her to reach, and judging by the state of her, she was too weak to lift him up.

“Let me help you, ma’am,” Jack said, and he lifted the kid so he could shimmy onto the platform, but he loyally waited for his mother. She was hauled up beside him, all angles and bones, and she smiled down at him when she stood up. It reminded him of his mother, poignantly; as arbitrary and as lonely as jetsam, a shipwrecked bundle of memories floating by. 

He looked away, and the smile he gave in return was dim. 

Adelaide stayed back to join the rest of the civilians onto the dropship. Gabriel and Jack were further down below, contemplating their next move. 

“So, what’s the plan?” 

“I’ll try to draw them away from the city.”

Gabriel’s gaze was distant. Jack knew that look; it was resignation, acceptance. It made him reach for his arm and pull him back. 

“You’re not going in alone.”

“We need someone to check for civilians.”

And Gabriel punctuated that statement with one of his trademark, nonchalant shrugs. It pissed him off. 

Jack opened his mouth to say something. Instead, Gabriel was looking behind them. 

When they heard the mechanical steps of the bastion, they ran. 

They skirted around blocks of the city, hand in hand, dull footsteps on blacktop, leaping over cars and broken glass, weaving their way through a jungle of cement, concrete, and steel—

The only surety was Gabriel’s hand firmly closed around his. It was the only thing real. It was their lifeline, the tether that kept them connected. Alive. 

“Lead it around. We can come back behind it and corner it,” Gabriel had said. Jack just numbly nodded, trying not to stumble. 

Now, his eyes landed on the bastion which was backed into a corner. It was out of ammunition. _Sheer war of attrition. Sheer war of flesh._ The machine wavered like a broken animal, wracked with uncertainty. His eyes focused closer, on the slight glare of reflected light on its arms—

Blood.

It made a sound the same time Jack growled. It was like a whimper, if a whimper could be mechanized and broadcasted at a frequency high enough to make his ears ring, and Gabriel scrambled briefly on the ground. Tried to get up, holding onto Jack’s forearm. Holding it with a vice grip, the way that made his forearm splotch purple and blue. He looked down. Gabriel was fighting off waves of pain, teeth gritted so hard the tendons of his neck popped. There was the tiniest register of agony in his side when he tried to help him up. 

“Back up,” Jack forced himself to sound strong, talking to the robot across the way, but it came out broken and weak. Broken and _human._ “Or I’ll--“ 

_You never seen their eyes_.

Gabriel warned, “Jack,” but he sounded far away—like someone was screaming a message to him across a valley—and Jack marched forward when the thing backed away. Its footsteps echoed down the alley. They had it trapped, and his own gun was drawn, the grip steel and unwavering, siphoned of his mercy, siphoned of his pity when he saw that red halo of blood on its arms. His own vision was reddening, incarnadine with anger, rage, loss, the rage of billions of humans, their voices crushed before they began. It blinded him to reason, and he felt months of anguish rocketing toward the surface, bruised and bloody and _voracious,_ as violent as a gnash of teeth. The last face of humanity. Vulnerose, lacerated, cornering when cornered.

“I _will_ shoot you!” 

“Jack, for fuck’s sake, let’s go! Forget about it! Killing it won’t solve anything, it’ll just _endanger_ us!”

His eyes were stuck on it.

Gabriel, pulling him away, his own feet stumbling back. 

The robot, its hand reaching for its chest.

The world, an eruption of white heat. 

_I don’t like conflict,_ Jack said one day. _I know what you’re gonna say. Really didn’t mean to punch him in the nose._

 _What’d he do, anyway,_ Gabriel was laughing, and Jack was starstruck as always, like being blinded by the death of a star. He realized it, now, that Gabriel was much like a star: constantly burning, simmering, his skin hot as stovetop, pulling him in when he got too close. The gravity was ineffable, unalterable. It was a law of matter. A law of physics, their inertia: the only in between there was, never lovers, never friends. An object in motion stays in motion, unless otherwise affected by another force.   
(Collision.) He remembered that in school, watching the two cars race toward each other in the video his teacher showed, slamming front-first. They were both destroyed, always, every time, but he kept repeating it, trial after trial, like someone might make it out alive. Like the laws of physics might not apply.

 _I don’t like being seen,_ he might as well have said, and Gabriel knew that because he knew _everything,_ even the words he never said, the words that hid in sublime silences festooned between them, in the unfinished clauses that hung like ellipses. Knew everything, saw everything with those eyes, a landscape of earth and gold, staring at him with that little smile of his. A quirk of his mouth, defined by hunger, the hunger of a flame, the hunger of wildfire: _for once, let him be forest, let him be leaves,_ land ripe for scorching _._

Gabriel leaned in and kissed him, then, and he was both consumed and consumer, both fire and forest, razing and razed. Hungering and sated, the product of two colliding fires. To touch him was an insurrection—they both knew that—of the highest caliber, murder in the first degree, because he would never be the same after that, the old self cleaved away a split second before their lips met. 

That was all a dream. It wasn’t what happened, because he made it all up right there when his world went white.

 _I know what you’re gonna say._ The laws always apply, and no one makes it out alive.

The world was on fire and full of bodies. 

The air was thick and full of echoes: ones of suffering, cries, agony—each death reimagined itself as a phantom, and he swore he could see it in his mind if he focused on it; raw, dense, dark energy, red energy, phantoms who never stopped wailing, subsuming, eating, tearing at the fragile corners of the world. Tearing into them, haunting emptiness, vacant vessels.

The world would never really _know_ those names. 

The world only knew itself as one great tomb. Among many, many others, cradles of pain, basins of blood, each a different tale of survival and brutality. _I don’t want to be a statistic. I don’t want to be just a number, demarcated to a generality in a history textbook, another casualty in another war. I want to be defined. Because it is my_ name.

A man—no, a boy—moved. 

Movement came in stages; it was embryonic, primal, as if he’d never moved before and he was teaching himself how to. He looked down at his hands, saw them. Bright red, burnt pink streaked with blood, and his flesh, burning. Like pouring kerosene on a wound. He got to his knees. He crawled toward light, his vision red with pain, blood dripping from his brow bone to his lashes into his eyes. 

This body was built to endure. This body was built to withstand, and survival was coded into it from its very inception, down to its synthetic fibers and synthetic bones. 

It said _breathe._ He felt like he was on fire, burning with the rest of the world, and his breaths came out shallow and _loud,_ like the eruption of gunfire in silence. His thoughts returned to him slowly, mechanically, trickling in, sediment through a funnel. 

It said _Gabriel._

He scanned around him, looking for him. He stretched out his senses, listening hard--beyond the crackling of flames, beyond his coarse breathing--into nothingness, and when he found only _silence,_ the panic made him run cold. 

_God, what if it’s you next?  
_   
He should have known better than to barter in promises. They were rare currency, and damn it, he was fucking careful with who he gave them out to, as rare as the certainty of _tomorrow_ or even the next second or the next minute. Because Gabriel was steel. Metal, as immovable as a mountain. He never thought of him as flesh, as fragile. If there was one person who had to make it out, it was _Gabriel_. Gabriel, who glowed golden in the sun, who turned white light prismatic, a starburst of color in a gray world. 

In the midst of his panic, he saw him. 

He was very still. He looked more like a body ready to be embalmed. He put his head in his lap, laying it down carefully as if it were made of porcelain. 

“Come on,” he whispered. “Come on, Gabe…” 

He stared down at him for an eternity. Even the fires went silent, extinguishing themselves, leaving only the beat of their hearts, and he, too, felt exhausted. Grief had hollowed him out one hundred times, but this felt more like a crater, like he had been struck by a train, the energy draining out of him like blood. 

So many things he wanted to say. So many things he should have said, all assailing him at once--memories, silences full of subtext, wordless gazes, love just shy of declaration. Declaration in pauses, in touches, the spaces between, the sentences unsaid, the utterances that unfolded in dreams. 

_Not Gabriel._ Not Gabriel, who carved himself into the world by sheer will alone. It already felt vapid and empty without him, the silence encroaching without his voice. It threatened to swallow him whole, a dark wave washing over him, dragging him into its depths, into pain and nameless faces. He wanted to become one of them. _I should have told him._ Should have should have should have, the futility and agony of past tense, another phantom that haunts him, that colors every memory red.

Gabriel opened his eyes.  
  
“Oh, thank God.” he rasped. He didn’t realize he was crying. “You done with your beauty sleep?” 

“Yeah. Kinda wanna go back, though...” 

Gabriel smiled, his eyes reflecting the dimming sun in the sky above.   
“You look like shit,” Jack sniffed. 

“Did we do it?”  
  
“Yeah.” 

He stroked his hair, hearing Gabriel’s warbled gasps, the way the air struggled to come in and out of his chest. He hated how his mind clinically assessed him, trying to detach him from this moment. 

“I think I got shrapnel in my ass.”  
  
It was so absurd, so uniquely _Gabriel,_ that it made him laugh. The tears still came, his hand shaky when it ran over his forehead, tender, like sacrament, like Gabriel was sacred. It conjured the memory of his mother, holding him as a child, sick and scared. “You’ll be okay. They’re coming soon. You’ll be okay.”

Repeating it. A mantra, clinging to it, more prayer than assurance. As if he could preserve his life just by speaking it, wish more moments into existence. He heard the low thrum of the dropship in the distance, coming toward them, slowly bulldozing through the silence. 

“Jack,” Gabriel whispered. 

“I’m here, don’t worry.”

“Jack, I’m scared.” 

The tears welled up uncontrollably this time. He had to be strong, because he always depended on Gabriel, and now Gabriel needed him. “You still have to show me all those places back at home you told me about.”

“Yeah.” Gabriel closed his eyes again, and that time he was hiding his tears. “There’s this place… you would like it. Far out from the city. You can see all the stars. Good for a homebody like you who’s probably never stepped foot into a city.”

Jack smiled, but it quickly crumbled. The ship, thundering in the silence. 

“And right now doesn’t count,” Gabriel murmured. “I never knew anything about stars. I could never see them. I thought they were a myth.”

“They’re not. You can see them back at home. I’ll take you there, we can sit on top of the barn and I can tell you all about them.” 

There was a long pause. “You’re unbelievable. There’s no one like you, Jack. No one.” 

Gabriel looked up at the sky for a moment, squinting, while Jack’s hand ran over his head over and over, until his gaze fell to him. The words unsaid. The words he may never get the chance to speak again, lancing through him. 

_No words_ . Only the way he bent down, the language he’s only ever known, his lips touching Gabriel’s, contradicting every single thing he ever thought about him: he was soft, pliable, _alive._ Fragile and sacred, the taste of blood sharp and metallic, the reminder of their mortality. This was his ensign, the banner he planted on unclaimed land—his way of _mine._ The world fell away, until it was only Gabriel and him, definitions indefinite, confused with one another, never knowing where the other begun and where he ended. _I’ll take you home. I’ll follow you to the ends of the world._

Gabriel’s eyes slipping shut. _Of course you know._ The sound of his breath, as loud as gunfire, swallowed by the roaring sound overhead. _Of course you could hear what I never said._ Who else? 

A language they both spoke, ancient as the dawn of the world. Reliable as true north. _I love you,_ translating love to flesh, to sound. 

Jack looked up, and the light came over them both. 


End file.
